The latest tech news, startups, business deals, and policy changes in Europe.

The month of May has brought—despite the holidays and relatively nice weather—quite a bunch of significant news stories relevant to the European tech community. First of all, a few important decisions have been made by the EU authorities, including its hands-off approach to blockchain regulation, and the introduction of a 20 percent European content quota for video streaming platforms. On the corporate side of things, several major deals have been made on the market, namely an IPO, an acquisition, and a funding agreement that added one more European company to the "unicorn" club.

Scroll down to catch up with the most important news stories in European tech in May.

Europe’s privacy chief has slammed the so-called Privacy Shield—a planned EU-US agreement to facilitate the flow of personal data across the Atlantic. The European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS), Giovanni Buttarelli, said that while he appreciates the efforts made to develop a solution to replace Safe Harbour," "the Privacy Shield as it stands is not robust enough to withstand future legal scrutiny before the court."

Authorities in Iceland and Germany are clamping down on Airbnb, citing the same reason—a housing shortage for locals. Berlin officials have begun implementing the law—dubbed Zweckentfremdungsverbot (which translates into English as "misappropriation ban")—that prohibits “improper use” of apartments, and allows stiff fines for those that flout the legislation. Their colleagues in Reykjavik are considering passing a policy that would require Airbnb hosts to pay business taxes if they rent out their properties—in full or in part—for more than 90 days per year.

EU research ministers have published a commitment to make “open access to scientific publications as the option by default by 2020.” In addition, ministers agreed “to the best possible reuse of research data as a way to accelerate the transition towards an open science system.” However, even if the new policy was fully implemented across the EU, it would only apply to new research. That would still leave a huge swathe of earlier papers inaccessible without a subscription to the journals in which they appeared.

European Parliament has voted for a hands-off approach to blockchain tech regulation. In a move that received the thumbs up from finance commissioner Jonathan Hill, European Parliament suggested that a “wait and see” approach would be more beneficial than suffocating the new tech with rules and legislation. In addition to that, Santander has announced that it would be the first UK bank to roll out a pilot scheme using blockchain technology for international payments.

Europe has made a €400 million down payment on world’s largest telescope. An organisation consisting of 15 European countries, as well as Chile and Brazil, has signed a contract to move forward with the construction of a large dome and structure to support a massive optical telescope that will have a 39-metre-wide main mirror. The European Southern Observatory said the contract keeps it on track to begin observing the night sky with the European Extremely Large Telescope (EELT) as early as 2024.

The European Commission will force Netflix, Amazon, and other on-demand video providers to ensure that at least 20 percent of their content is European in origin. That includes UK national content, so no one will be forced to watch French or Italian films. The platforms will also be required to properly tag content that could be harmful to children, such as pornography or glorified violence. Rules banning hate speech have additionally been extended to video sharing platforms and downloadable content.

Further Reading

Google faces a fine as high as $3 billion (£2.1 billion) in the European Commission's long-running antitrust case. As if to add to the search engine’s problems in the EU, hundreds of French investigators raided the company’s Paris offices—the search giant is suspected of avoiding tax in the country to the tune of €1.6 billion (£1.22 billion). In the meantime, Google has appealed against an order from France's data watchdog to globally de-list certain search results, thereby intensifying a row over the European Union's two-year-old "right to be forgotten" landmark ruling.

Uber has been ordered to suspend its ridesharing UberPOP service in two Swedish cities, but it also scored some points elsewhere. The company is going to launch the UberX service, which uses licensed professional drivers, in Berlin in June, after failing to find enough drivers in some of the country's other cities. In addition to that, Uber has appointed Europe's former digital agenda commissioner Neelie Kroes to serve on its new public policy advisory board.

Enlarge/ The current state of 5GHz Wi-Fi spectrum. The UK is looking at opening up two new 80MHz channels on the right hand side, near channel 155.

Wi-Fi networks in the UK may soon get a lot faster and suffer from less congestion thanks to a new proposal to open up more 5GHz spectrum. Ofcom is now investigating opening up two additional 80MHz channels in a block that is currently allocated to fixed Earth-to-satellite radio uplinks in the UK. The plan would be to combine a newly-freed-up 125MHz block with some of the existing 5GHz Wi-Fi allocation.

UK citizens could eventually use their iPhones as an "add-on" option for their driving licences. A prototype has been already revealed by the driver and vehicle licensing agency’s (DVLA) chief Oliver Morley. He later added that there was no definitive timeline for the introduction of iPhone-stored licences, and that they won't replace conventional plastic cards altogether.

Microsoft has sold the feature phone portion of Nokia’s feature phone business for £242 million, and announced laying off “up to 1,850” people in Finland and elsewhere. CEO Satya Nadella insisted that the company is still working in the phone space, but in a much narrower way. The Finnish government, in its turn, has criticised the corporation for the job cuts, as well as “broken promises” of making Finland a hub and keeping research and development jobs.

Germany-based Adblock Plus has joined up with Sweden’s Flattr to create "Flattr Plus," a system for Web users who want to pay online content creators. Flattr Plus users will set their own monthly budget that will pay favourite bloggers, musicians, artists, or newspapers. The payments will be apportioned automatically, based on a user's engagement with various websites. Flattr was co-founded by a man who already knows a thing or two about running controversial Web services: Peter Sunde, who also created and operated The Pirate Bay.

Philips, the Dutch electronics giant, said that the initial public offering of its lighting unit valued the business at €3 billion (£2.3 billion). Philips said it has sold 37.5 million shares, representing 25 percent of the lighting business. After the IPO, Philips Lighting is valued at €4.5 billion (£3.5 billion), including debt. The Dutch company will receive proceeds of €750 million (£580 million) from the offering.

Mobile roaming costs in the European Union have been capped once again. Mobile service providers can no longer charge customers more than 4 pence (€0.05) on top of the domestic price for one minute of an outgoing call, or 1MB of data. Meanwhile, a new cap of 1.6 pence (€0.02) has been applied for sent text messages. The new measures represent the final crackdown on carriers' surcharges, before roaming prices are expected to be completely abolished in the EU in June 2017.

Opera software has updated its browser with a free VPN service and power saving mode. Opera users can choose between the firm's VPN servers in the US, Canada, and Germany—with the promise that the list of locations will soon grow. The feature is currently available on desktop only, but Opera added that it had plans to offer a mobile version at a later date. As for the power saving mode, Opera's SVP of engineering Krystian Kolondra said that the new feature "can increase the battery life by as much as 50 percent" through "reducing activity from background tabs, adapting page-redrawing frequency, and tuning video-playback parameters."

British chip giant ARM has acquired the imaging and embedded computer vision technology company Apical for £242 million (€313 million) in cash. The deal is said to support ARM’s “new imaging products for next generation vehicles, security systems, robotics, mobile and any consumer, smart building, industrial or retail application.”

Estonian-founded and the UK-based Transferwise has joined the “unicorn club” by raising $26 million (£18 million, €23.3 million) in funding at a valuation of $1.1 billion. The company’s co-founder and CEO Taavet Hinrikus told TechCrunch that the money will be used to improve the loss-making startup’s balance sheet as it continues to plough all revenue into future growth.

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Andrii Degeler
Andrii is a contributing reporter at Ars Technica UK, covering a wide range of topics from policy to hardware and crowdfunding. He holds a master's degree in Journalism from the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. Emailandrii@proceed.to//Twitter@adegeler